Rory
Spring term announced itself with a qualifier schedule brutal enough to make fall look like a warmup, and I welcomed the exhaustion, honestly, because exhaustion left considerably less room for thinking about the specific silence that had settled between me and Jarvis since the dining hall conversation.
We were fine. Technically. He still passed me the puck during drills, still called me Rookie in the locker room, still functioned as captain with all the easy competence he always had. But something had gone careful between us, some warmth quietly dimmed, and I hated how much I noticed its absence in a hundred small ways throughout every single practice.
I threw myself back into the investigation instead, because at least that was a mess I understood the shape of.
The mystery name
